Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Cartoon Illustrations

From time to time, people call me and want me to do magazine covers or illustrations for them. They assume that all cartoonists can do all kinds of cartoons, and I hate to have to dissapoint them.

To me, a cartoon illustration is a painting- like in the old Golden Books by J.P. Miller, Mary Blair, Mel Crawford and Gustaf Tenggren-in other words, not just a cartoon drawing filled with flat color, but a real painting. Like they used to do thousands of years ago before culture died.

Unfortunately, I can't paint-for some reason, paint and brushes hate me and will only make messes under my direction. The extent of my actual paintings were in Big House Blues where I did many of the backgrounds because I couldn't find any real background artists at the time to help (except Bob Camp who did all the good ones in the cartoon). What a mess! Strangely enough, my splotchy, messy BGs caught on and became a style and now there are whole shows on network TV with messy sloppy backgrounds in them on purpose!

I admire people like Bill Wray (my favorite cartoon painter), Kristy Gordon, Nick Cross, Jay Li, Simon Dupuis, Scott Wills, Richard Ziehler-Martin, Vicki Jensen and the like who can paint real paintings with great skill and appeal in a cartoon style. Most can also paint straight paintings too.

OK, bored yet? I don't blame you.So my dilemma a few years back was how to make my cartoons look like real paintings without having to actually use paint.I hated all digital paintings and still do for the most part-especially that Photoshop crap. Yeeesh!

I discovered another program called Painter which is a torture program, but at least it has a few variations of things they call "Brushes" that you can paint with. The strange part is, none of the things they call "brushes' look anything remotely like any real brushes. But what the Hell, I was able to at least make some kinda pseudo painterly looking pictures and the art directors at the magazines never complained!

So here are a few.

This one was done back when Fred Seibert just took over Hanna Barbera and was revamping it and turning the Cartoon Network into something real. I showed him a bunch of weird looking caricatures I did of Hanna Barbera characters, and he said "We gotta do something with this". So he had me produce a laser disk collection of the first 14 episodes of The Flintstones from 1960. I did all the cover and insert art with Craig Kelly doing layout and design. You gotta get this box set! It has the best supplemental materials ever! Commercials showing the Flintstones smoking Winstons' cigarettes, the original pilot with different voices, all the crazy off model toys from the 1960s-from my collection and Bob Jaques' too. Jerry Beck helped me find tons of rare commercials starring the Flintstones in the 1960s. Earl Kress helped me write liner notes for a special booklet. I show you how to tell one Hanna Barbera animator from another in special music videos edited by Henry Porch. The picture above is the cover to the insert.Later Fred asked me to do the Ranger Smith cartoons, and then he hired other artists to imitate my f...-ed-up style of Hanna Barbera drawings to use for merchandise.

Here are a couple Spumco Comic Book covers:

The cover from Media Magazine:

Here's a tease from something I will tell you more about later:

Stay tuned to my and Katie Rice's Blog. I'm gonna paint one of her great girlie drawings with fake paint soon!

I remember that cover to WIRED.. holy shit. I must've been 11 years old when I saw that, my dad had a copy. I only glanced at it, just once, but I never, ever forgot it. And recently, watching and drooling over Ren and Stimpy since coming to art school to learn to animate, it's been nagging at the back of my mind, that cover to some magazine my dad had. I was starting to think I'd just imagined it.

The captions are in the correct places in the RSS feed so it's just a CSS thing. The Flintstones thing sounds great. You should get Cartoon Network to buy more of your work instead of playing Ranger Smith every week.

It's like I'm back in school again. I've been very frustrated with Photoshop recently, and have tried to get into Painter with little success. Looks like I'd better try again. Thanks again for all the cool information!

John, I have to you ask you an embrarassing thing. It's purely out ot medical interest, you see? What are those wormy things George Licquor is clipping from under his armpit? I ask you because I have those, and I'm afraid to show it to someone else, so I never had them diagnosed. I have to find what they are!!!

I understand your fustration with digital painting, but actually photoshop's come a long way over the last two years. There's a lot more than just a handful of silly airbrushes in there now, plus you can create your own drybrushes and sponge effects.

This is a great blog. You have always been one of my favorites, someone who really understands animation. I was recently looking over some Preston Blair drawing's of Red from a 40's Harmann-Ising cartoon and was really struck by how similar your work is: dynamic, fluid and perfectly exaggerated. And watching Hanna and Barbera's Tom and Jerry always brings you to mind as well.

I quote your description of Bluth all the time (great hilarity ensues when we count arm-waves in any of his features).

I'm a huge fan. John's drawings are fantastic. Can anyone tell me where I can pick up those comics? I remember reading one of them in a comic book store when I was a kid and I've never forgot about it. I wish I had bought it when I had the chance! Please keep the blog going, John!

hi johnreally love the blog!wanted to ask you a question about an art project, but not in a public forum, do you have any contact info you would publish, or e mail me? (ayejay@ayejay.com) thank you either way, your work means so much to so many people!

I really love your drawings. They're too damn cool. Very expressive stuff!! I love painting especially w/ gouache paints and I've always loved a painted BG ever since R&S came out. I tried using Photoshop once, but it makes my drawings seem uninteresting and then I question: what do we learn from something digitally made rather than something hand made? it baffles me! Picasso's way more interesting than a digitally made abstract painting is what I say!

Painter does do a fairly reasonable job of imitating actual materials.Photoshop has one brush that lets almost anyone who use it do a reasonably half arsed impression of a classic illustration style without actually having any talent whatsoever.

All that was fake paint?? Funky! I'm still trying to figure out real painting;I've given up on oils and attempting to work with gouache/watercolours and acrylics. P.S. Gotta love those oldschool "Golden-Book"-type illustrations!

Can you tell use the History of Spumco.com? I remember going to it every day, it had the amazing Pussy series Flash Cartoon, won Webby Awards and next thing you know the site was G-O-N-E. What the heck happened if you don't mind me asking?

I could have sworn that Archive.org had a copy of the Fred Flintsone and Barney Rubble Winston commercials but could not locate it ...anyway it can be found herehttp://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomcig.html

Are there any cartoons that you watch? Have you seen the stop animateion Moral Orel?

I was at the Alamo Drafthouse lunch in Austin back in August. I had an amazing time, but I didn't really get a chance to talk much as I was at the other end of the table.

Anyway, I got to thinking after that day that you might want to take another look at distributing via the Internet. I think you were ahead of your time with Spumco.com and charging for cartoon shorts. With the advent of the Video iPod and networks selling shows over the Internet, cheaper broadband, more powerful PCs and other mobile devices, I think you could produce shows now and have a large enough audience that it'd be economically feasible.

I saw an interview last year where you mentioned you were doing a deal to get some of your stuff available to cell phones. What happened with that? And can you give us an update on the Lost Episodes DVD or any of the other DVD releases that seem to be delayed?

Glad to see you're blogging, great stuff. The sketch you did of my wife and I (from the Alamo thing TTrentham mentioned) hangs proudly on our wall ... thanks again. I've got a few photos up on Flickr as well. Looking forward to your posts.

Hey John, nice blog. I'm "one of the people" that asked you to do a magazine cover... in fact, I asked you to do this WIRED cover, back when I was the design director. It was great to see it again - it's still pretty much my favorite cover ever. The scratch-n-sniff sticker that we placed in George Liquor's armpit was probably my favorite trick ever done on one of our covers. For anyone that missed it, the sticker had two different smells (depending on which cover you happened to get)... banana, and flowers. --Daniel Carter

I hate you, and your work. But your work also makes me laugh like a little girl. And your work scares me like a little girl. And that typoe of cookie is fucked up. But I'm still laughing. Thanks for ruining my life and bending my pschee. And ruining classical music for ME and NOW MY KID. :-) http://cmevans.magic-servers.com/main.asp

Great blog, Mr. Kricfalusi. This is an excellent way to keep in touch with the fans.Incidently, my student film Hansel und Gretel was broadcast on Zed in Canada on the same day they showed an animated interview with you more than 2 years ago. I always considered it a privaledge to have my film on the same schedule as yours.

I remember of having seen in a cover of a 1998 issue from the Animation Magazine, a illustration of yours, showing an interesting crossover involving Hanna-Barbera and Terrytoons: George Jetson enjoying to ride with Mighty Mouse on a flight!